How can we display a simple custom page in SharePoint?

Ok first thing there is no concept of simple page in SharePoint. There are two types of pages in SharePoint as we discussed in the previous article one is an Application page and the other is the site page.

Application page is a generic page while site pages are custom to a website. To just cool you off lets display a simple Application page first.

Some points to be noted about Application pages:-• They are pages which are shared across sites like ‘settings.aspx’ , which will helps us set generic properties across sites in a site collection.• The second important part is that we need to save application pages in ‘C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\LAYOUTS’ folder. If you browse to the folder you will find SharePoint’s own application pages.

Ok, what we will do is that to build confidence let’s make a simple page called as ‘SimplePage.aspx’. We are not doing anything great in this we will just write this simple sentence inside the page.

<b> Ohhhh I never Knew SharePoint is so easy </b>

Once you have saved the page just browse to the IIS application and browse to the _layouts folder as shown in the figure below. If you open the page in browser you should see your display message.

Note: -For the next question you need to understand the concept of master pages. If you have not please read it once. Consistent look and feel is one of the most important factor in enterprise portal and SharePoint achieves the same using Master pages.